T
hey pulled something out of somewhere, but ‘tweren’t no rabbit outta no hat. Listening to their last couple of singles, you could have predicted that Sparks would end up making mechanical pop music like this. As with Devo, the unpredictable panoply of subversive hyperpop slowly yielded to smartalecky synthesizer music, much of it quickly repackaged for its ultimate destination on the dancefloor. And so you’ll find extended mixes of “Pretending To Be Drunk” and “Progress” in lieu of proper singles. Not since No. 1 In Heaven had Sparks placed so much emphasis on synthesizers, leaving Russell’s falsetto to play second fiddle to Ron’s symphony of cartoonish sounds. There’s usually one romantic, lump-in-the-throat number on a Sparks album, and here “With All My Might” would get the nod. If you wanted to make a hat trick out of it, score “A Song That Sings Itself” and “Sisters” as winners too, but you really don’t need to hare the rest of it. In their pursuit of complete man-machine fusion, most electronic bands went too far, subverting everything (guitar, drums, vocals) to the synthetic aesthetic. The happy accidents of human manipulation and cooperation were replaced with cold, precalculated keystrokes, a digital dumbing-down of soundwaves into ones and zeros. Sparks has been a synthesizer band for some time, you might say, but it was always balanced with an analog strangeness (“Sextown U.S.A.,” “Rockin’ Girls”) that charmed you into its electronic camp. Those expecting the old magic would do well to consider the disappearing act that followed, effectively ending the band’s major-label career.